True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  This is a scene from The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, which won Terry Pratchett the Carnegie Medal for children’s literature in 2001. (Astonishingly, up to that point, the first book prize he had ever won. ‘They’ve never given me anything for my writing’, he told the press. ‘Apart of course from a pile of money big enough to fill St Paul’s Cathedral.’) Maurice is a cat; the rats are accidental beneficiaries of a magic spillage; together with a daft-looking human boy who plays the flute they travel from town to town, working a Pied Piper-related con on the unsuspecting inhabitants. Ethically challenging, beautifully orchestrated, philosophically opposed (like all of Pratchett’s books) to the usual plot fixes of fantasy, The Amazing Maurice deserved its medal. But as usual, there was a certain arbitrariness about which one of a good author’s good books an award goes to. Johnny and the Dead (1993) and Johnny and the Bomb (1996), the two high points in Pratchett’s series about a melancholy thirteen-year-old assailed by supernatural troubles, were just as amazing as Maurice.

  Actually, there was a further arbitrary element at work, specific to Terry Pratchett, when he won a prize for children’s books. The truth is that he wrote in almost exactly the same way for children as he did for adults. There have been other writers, like Peter Dickinson, who wrote for both and drew on aspects of the same sensibility to enrich both; but Pratchett essentially worked in exactly the same mode for both audiences. The qualities in him that might be thought of as ideally suited to children’s books, like his unembarrassed pleasure in wordplay, his easy access to polymorphous messing around with words, were equally central to his adult novels. Whichever audience he was talking to, he was always engaged in a kind of comic explanation. He had something he was interested in, in his head, and he was sorting it out for himself and his audience in the form of a story – a story with jokes, which for him, as for all serious comedians, he set off like explosions of discovery, each revealing a relationship between things, underlining an uncertainty, warming an idea so it showed its human meaning. He always wrote streamlined sentences, easy to assimilate, because he had plans for the reader’s attention, and wanted to lead it along twiddly inventive paths without wasting any on unnecessary obstacles.

  To be sure, the adult Discworld novels were all comedies of recognition. Part of the point was always to spot which thing in our world the Discworld was refracting in satirical form, from Macbeth to email. Pratchett’s children’s books took exemplary care to contain in themselves everything you needed to understand what was going on, to be their own completely adequate guidebook. But then they, too, offered the pleasures of recognition. The Amazing Maurice provides pleasingly sharp reminders of the whole, frequently icky tradition of humanised animal stories, not least because the rats are in the process of constructing a religion around a discarded picture book about a rabbit in a waistcoat called Mr Bunnsy; and it gives you foolish behaviour to recognise that will be as familiar to readers of ten as to readers of forty.

  Terry Pratchett was always writing the same kind of satire, one whose picture of human (and rat) nature his readers tended to cherish, whether child or adult, because it was fundamentally hopeful. In Pratchett’s eyes, people were ridiculous, but often kind; deluded, but good-hearted; irrational, but in consequence also strangely innocent. Even his thugs often had a sheepish simplicity about their thuggishness. He genially accepted that people are self-interested brawlers locked in a Darwinian scrum, but he didn’t think we should find it too hard to forgive ourselves for that, so long as we don’t claim we’re allowed to behave badly because we’re better than other people. Pratchett hated condescension. In fact, taken to its extreme, condescension becomes the one unforgiveable sin in Pratchett’s world: treating other people as things. Characters who do that aroused his sense of real horror, and are the true villains of his novels: the elves in Lords and Ladies, the vampires in Carpe Jugulum, Mr Teatime the assassin in Hogfather (pronounced Tay-at-im-ay, if you please).

  By choice, he did popular art, and he had a quite deliberate sense of what that entailed, if it was to mean more than art that happens to have hit a fashion, or art that gets a big audience as a nice bonus. It means using the common language, it means deliberately working on the huge areas of emotional experience that overlap for all of us. One of the reasons he was so interested in stories as such is that the famous stories, the urban legends, the central stories of religion, the fairy tales everyone knows, tend each to record a way of making sense of exactly one of these areas of shared experience. It’s not an accident that his books so often took on an existing story – as Maurice does with the Pied Piper. Where there’s a story, there’s sure to be a rich deposit of stuff-we-all-care-about. He trusted the accumulated wisdom of storytelling to point out what’s really important. Then, of course, he reshaped the story, because he combined a remarkable ability to access shared, generic imaginings, with a very idiosyncratic imagination of his own. He campaigned against the idea that stories offer a reliable guide to reality: but he still thought they were essential maps, and that it was important to get the right story, the right map, because it affects how generous and tolerant you can manage to be, really.

  Some things he couldn’t do (which is a bit of a relief). He didn’t do beauty. He didn’t do epic. With him, large-scale scenes came out more like the big numbers in a musical, or like the synchronised swimming that the rats do in bowls of cream. He did sadness, but he didn’t do tragedy, because tragedy puts things beyond the reach of the comic recuperation of sadness which was his writing’s big gift. It’s typical that in Maurice, when the kid with the flute confronts a professional rat piper, Pratchett endorsed the common sense of the watching crowd, who ‘were rather attached to the experience of real life, which is that when someone small and righteous takes on someone big and nasty, he is grilled bread product, very quickly’. And still arranged for the small person to win. He bungee-jumped into the midst of grim things, and lifted his hat. Good evening!

  (2001)

  YOU COULD READ FOREVER

  The chances are, if you’ve bought a Companion to Tolkien, or a Guide to Finnegans Wake, or the encyclopaedic Quid de Proust, that you’ve read the original books to exhaustion, fat though they are. The spines are broken, the page corners are waxy. Still you want to linger just a while longer, in a kind of lean-to extension built around the back of the house of the book. Companions blunt the realisation that even the longest fictions have a last page, a back cover, and therefore a definitive back door through which you must step out.

  Ordinarily they do, anyway. Robert Irwin’s companion to the Arabian Nights can’t.33 It accompanies a book no-one except the most persistent scholars can be said to have exhausted – a virtually unknown book, despite the ingrained familiarity of some of the stories it contains. We know it as the source of stories, almost always four or five removes distant from the ‘Aladdin’ or the ‘Ali Baba’ we have at hand: not as a succession of pages. In a way this familiarity without effort or direct acquaintance is a tribute to the vitality of the Nights, whose tales hop borders and cultures and centuries, endlessly mutating, yet persisting in recognisable forms. (At one point Irwin experiments with the biological conceit of stories as ‘selfish word strings’ like ‘selfish’ genes, always pressing to be reproduced. Terry Pratchett, as it happens, used the same idea last year in a story: a good paradoxical argument for its being correct, since the book in question has reproduced all over the place.)

  Alf Layla Wa Layla, the One Thousand and One Nights, Irwin quotes Borges as saying, is ‘so vast that it is not necessary to have read it’. He meant that the enormous collection of tales has so settled into overlap with the grand collection constituting Western culture, that we are all, effectively, in the Arabian Nights already. But however pleasing the idea might be of a limitless book, a world-sized and world-shaped book, the literal bulk of the literal Nights is no joke. Talking for her life in the bed of King Shahriyar, Scheherazade subjects her twitchy, murderous listener to eloquen
ce on a scale which overbears and oppresses the imagination. In the longest versions the book of her talk holds 480-something stories, distributed unevenly over the 1,001 sessions. The local pleasure you may take in the appearance of one genie desiccates at the prospect of a multitude more of them. You don’t exhaust the Nights: it exhausts you.

  Then there is the question of what, exactly, you would be looking at if you set out to ‘read the Arabian Nights’. As Irwin explains, in illuminating chapters exploring the translation history and textual history of the monster, when Alf Layla Wa Layla was first translated into French in 1704, no single authoritative version of it existed in Arabic to be referred to. Related collections called by the same name have ballooned and contracted in different parts of the Arab world since the tenth century – probably. There is no certain date of composition, certainly no chance of identifying one author. The ‘frame story’ of Scheherazade may be Persian, or Indian, and much older. Many of the tales may have passed back and forth between writing and oral performance several times over, leaving the marks of successive erosions and embroideries. The translations, in turn, have added to the vagueness; they follow a scattering of fairly recent Arabic manuscripts, or a foursome of printed Arabic versions from the early nineteenth century, one prepared for the East India Company to help its cadets learn the language. A collated canonical text is only now appearing, and, for a final deterrent, the fullest English translation, which Irwin quotes perforce, remains the maddening sixteen-volume edition by Sir Richard Burton.

  Irwin’s account of Burton’s ‘kinky, obtrusive’ editorial methods is a dry comic triumph. ‘In a note in the fifth supplementary volume, he cites Swedenborg on how there will be no looking at the backs of people’s heads in the afterlife.’ Less engagingly, Burton inserted slobbering and eye-rolling whenever a black character appeared. The only nice thing you can say about Burton’s handling of the sex in the Nights is that his style ensured the erotic passages would be virtually incomprehensible, because, above all, Burton rendered his sixteen volumes in a jumbled archaic diction of his own devising. When a king is sad, in Burton, ‘there betided him sore cark and care and chagrin exceeding’. With terrifying industriousness, Burton gothicised every part of Scheherazade’s night-talk, lending curlicues, not to a single house of fiction, but a whole city of it, a sort of sprawling Cairo of story, now styled by Burton as a voluptuous, contorted vision of the Middle East rather like contemporary European paintings of the real Cairo.

  What a metropolis like this needs is a crisp, reassuringly finite guidebook. Irwin provides it. As an academic Arabist and an adventurous remoulder in his own right of the Nights (he wrote The Arabian Nightmare) he can cite erudite chapter and experienced verse for the double status of the book. It is both an Arab literary monument and a prime vehicle for Orientalist projections. The incalculable extent of the Nights, he shows, has actually served the more fluid ends of Western writers, who have pinned its name to their own dreams and hallucinations. He discusses a glorious description by De Quincey of his opium-induced thrall to the Nights, perhaps the most marvelling and marvellous passage quoted in the book. But the story De Quincey thinks he remembers, about a magician who can distinguish an individual’s footsteps on the far side of the globe amidst the drumming of a million other feet, lacks an origin in any known variant of any Nights tale.

  Irwin cannot, of course, give a fixed or straightforward picture of the ‘original’ Nights, as it was written, read and recited in Arabic before Antoine Galland first adapted it to the taste of Versailles. He can, though, open it up boldly as a box of Egyptian and Syrian social history, an implicit record of manners and expectations. The audience of the Nights, he argues, were the confident petty bourgeois of the medieval Islamic cities. They were shopkeepers who enjoyed the fantasy of miraculous wealth at the rub of a lamp. They were citizens susceptible to beggars’ operas and low-life exploits. Irwin reconstructs a world where burglars would case a house by sending in a tortoise with a lighted candle stuck on its shell, where slum gangs were available for war against the infidel, mounted piggyback on other homeboys in horse costumes. In the market, actors played ancient farces inherited from the Roman and Byzantine theatre; amazing cons trapped the unwary; male picnic-parties improvised poetry in the public gardens. Despite the evident pride in ‘urban Muslim know-how’, as Irwin puts it, this small-time life scarcely participated in the high culture of court and university. Learning could filter down into it, as in the case of the ingenious law ­code devised by the jurists to govern sexual relations between humans and jinns, and the occasional scholar took an interest in the popular arts. Ibn Daniyal, a thirteenth-century ophthalmologist, wrote shadow-puppet plays which sound rather like Ben Jonson comedies. But for the most part, educated opinion regarded stories as khurafa, or lies, vulgar shallow stuff. Hence the low critical valuation put on the Nights in the Arab world right up to the present day, a low opinion now reinforced by the Nights’ unsuitability as Pan-Arab reading (too much dialect), and by the childish image of Arab culture it has spread in the West.

  The tenth-century bookseller Ibn al-Nadim attempted a universal bibliography. He included prose fiction but, says Irwin, called it ‘cold’, in distinction to ‘warm’ poetry, thought of as the expressive outpouring of noble hearts. It’s a judgement that keeps coming back to you, in a larger sense, as you read Irwin, especially when he arrives in his excellent final chapter at modernist appropriations of the Nights. The use of the book as a formal grid, as a treasury of ‘early and exotic examples of . . . self reference . . . recursion and intertextuality’, may invent an emphasis strange to the early audiences. But it matches the Nights’ abiding fascination with wonders instead of with individuals, or shaded motives. So far as characterisation is concerned, the Nights rests content presenting chunks of destiny in roughly human form. A cruel man ‘is cruel because he does cruel acts, and does cruel acts because he is cruel’. The Nights does marry well, sometimes, with the novel’s interest in individualised people. Its wonders can be metaphors, an appetite for those wonders an indication of what heats somebody. A steam hammer, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, recalls ‘to Mr Hale some of the wonderful stories of subservient genii in the Arabian Nights’; the genie’s power to fill the sky, then to shrink ‘into a vase small enough to be borne in the hand of a child’, takes on an industrial, a sexual, a personal significance. Which is never true of the impersonal perceptions of a tale. Like fairy tales of every culture, read end-to-end the stories of the Nights make you profoundly glad novels exist. All those thousands of pages, all those heroes and villains: you could read forever, and never get warm.

  (1994)

  THIS GRAND CAUSE OF TERROR

  The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City, Felix Gilman’s pair of fantasies transmogrifying the mythologies of American history, are both rich books, full of pleasures for the reader. But the pair of them are also, to an unusual degree, in the business of being deliberately frustrating, of withholding from readers a set of expected pleasures that seemed to have been virtually promised us. I mean pleasures that are usual to fantasy as a genre – pleasures, even, that are usual to the implicit contract a plot makes between writer and reader. And yet what Gilman holds back, what he refuses to deliver, is essential to the power of the effect he does create.

  There’s a sense, of course, in which refusing to provide the expected is absolutely basic, phrase by phrase, word by word, to all writing which aspires to be adequate at all: to fulfil Operation A of any newly made row of words, which is to convince us that is new, or at any rate new enough to persuade us that it has some particular effort of communication behind it. A cliché by definition is a lump of expected language. All writers of narrative prose who wish their stories to live – at least, to twitch from time to time on the slab – must therefore be engaged in a ceaseless low-level effort to keep refreshing the unpredictability of the surface of language. Even just at the level of gesture. As Gore Vidal (I think) p
ointed out, while crapping from a height on some bestseller of the day, it doesn’t do much to write ‘by crook or by hook’ instead of ‘by hook or by crook’ – but it at least shows willing. Since Felix Gilman writes taut, witty, lexically adventurous prose in a variety of voices and registers, he is necessarily signed up to denying expectation in this minimal sense.

  His characteristic and individual refusals, though, start to come into view when you look at his attitude to describing the central inventions of the invented world of the two books. At what he will say, and what he won’t, about the mythic linchpins of his own creation. Gilman’s world is demon-haunted. Beyond the mountains that stand in for the Atlantic in dividing old settled kingdoms from new territories, in a West where colonisation literally fixes the terrain out of the primal murk, two sets of dark powers rule. The demons of the Gun literalise the anarchic violence of American expansion, and the demons of the Line literalise the devouring order of industrial mass society. Far more than merely metaphors, these beings are central to the books’ translation of history into fantasy. They imaginatively reconfigure the qualities and consequences of human history into its independent drivers. Causation has been upended. From being merely epiphenomena of unpoliced spaces full of firearms, now massacre and mayhem have become the point, the goal, the chief delight of Marmion and Belphagor and the other spirits of the Gun, muttering in their blood-warm Lodge somewhere between the stars. From being merely side-effects of the Industrial Revolution, now noise and sickness and ugliness and uniformity have become the positive vision, the plan for the world, of the thirty-eight unkillable Engines who travel the network of the Line. Humanity’s relations with these rival lords of destruction are fully Faustian, and where they and their human followers collide, catastrophe spreads. Reading The Half-Made World, we hear quite a lot of the voice of the particular Gun that speaks in the mind of John Creedmoor, one of the novel’s three protagonists; and we see (since hearing would destroy human ears) the telegraphed orders of the Engines, as they drive onward their representative in the plot, the matchstick man Lowry and his army of lurching, coughing, bullying, agoraphobic little grey-clad followers. But it’s all consequences, it’s all secondary. Of the Guns and the Engines themselves we get only the most minute and occasional glimpses. Their motives and modes of existence are said to be beyond human understanding, not as the preliminary build-up to some full-on evocation, ripe with paradox, but as the plain warrant for the book not including them: there they aren’t.